Cece poses for a moment in the garden.
Wed 11 Aug 2010
Cece at the wedding
Posted by Ken Atherton under Daily Life
No Comments
Tue 10 Aug 2010
The Girls and Great-Grandma Gumke
Posted by Ken Atherton under Daily Life
No Comments
Mon 9 Aug 2010
Sadie at the wedding
Posted by Ken Atherton under Daily Life
No Comments
Sun 8 Aug 2010
The Cotton Family
Posted by Ken Atherton under Uncategorized
No Comments
This is a family portrait of the Cotton side of the family at Tim’s and Stephanie’s wedding.
The wedding was held at Avon Gardens.
Local Tags: avon, avon gardens, carissa, celia, david, ken, sadie, sandi, shirley, stephanie, tim cotton, wedding
Format this post for printing
Sun 18 Jul 2010
Summer Camp Video
Posted by Ken Atherton under Daily Life
No Comments
Here are Carissa and her friends performing a classic summer camp sketch at the talent show a few days ago.
Clearly, it is important to be careful with beans.
Thu 15 Jul 2010
A Morning Walk Through Rennes
Posted by Ken Atherton under France
No Comments
I went back to Rennes for a few days at the end of June to attend the quarterly staff workshop hosted by my manager at work. This was the second time I’ve been back to Rennes this year after a 4-year-long absence, and the first time I’d had a chance to walk around the old city center.
At this time of year, Rennes gets close to 18 hours of day light. I took advantage of this by getting up early in the morning to take a walk, and even before 6 in the morning on a cloudy day, I was able to take decent photographs. Plus, due to the early hour, I had the streets almost to myself.
I’m not particularly nostalgic about living in Rennes, but this view of a quiet, narrow street at dawn reminds me of what I did like about living there.
A view down Rue Saint-Milaine from the east end
Mon 28 Jun 2010
Our Family at Tim and Stephanie’s Wedding
Posted by Ken Atherton under Daily Life
No Comments
Tim and Stephanie got married at Avon Gardens last week. We haven’t seen the official pictures yet, but we used the opportunity to take a few pictures of our own family in such a nice setting.
Carissa with a paper umbrella.
Mommy and Sadie
CeCe on a foot bridge.
Sandi and I
Local Tags: avon, avon gardens, carissa, celia, indiana, ken, sadie, sandi, wedding
Format this post for printing
Thu 10 Jun 2010
The Valley of the Kings
Posted by Ken Atherton under egypt, vacation
No Comments
We spent the longest portion of our time on the west bank of the Nile in the Valley of the Kings. After the Egyptians discovered that building pyramids was a great way to annonce to the grave robbers of the world where your treasure was buried, they began burying the pharaohs in the valley, a secluded area not too far from Luxor. Even this strategy was only slightly successful. Of the 62 tombs found in the valley, only one was not emptied out in antiquity — KV62, the tomb of King Tutankhamen, which was discovered in 1922.
The valley is, unfortunately, another one of those places where photography is not allowed. Or at least, it is currently not allowed. The numerous pictures I’ve seen on the internet of the valley suggests to me that the ban on photography is recent or only randomly enforced.
It was certainly being enforced when we were there. Carissa and I decided to go into King Tut’s tomb, which has a separate admission fee from the rest of the valley. While we were inside the tomb, I got the wise idea to post to Facebook a status update about where I was — I had seen earlier that, surprisingly, cell reception was very good in the valley.
I had no sooner taken my phone out of my pocket and turned it on when a man guarding the tomb walked up and demanded my phone. the phone has a camera built in, and apparently even the presence of the camera was not allowed, regardless of the fact that I wasn’t using the camera.
So I had to follow the man out of the tomb to the office of the director. The director wanted to see what pictures were on my phone and said that I would have to delete any pictures taken in the tomb. Well, there weren’t any picture of the tomb on my camera — I hadn’t been trying to take any. Unfortunately for me, the phone locked up when I was trying to open the photo application. This was not making the director happy because it seemed like I was trying to hide something. I eventually had to reboot the phone, which takes forever even in the best of circumstances but is absolutely excruciating when you are under pressure.
I think Einstein once used a similar analogy to help people understand how to think about how time slows down as the speed of an object approaches the speed of light. It’s like trying to sit on a hot stove. Time seems to move really slowly.
Eventually, the director told me to leave the phone with him, and I should come back when I was done visiting the other tombs. After I rejoined the group, our tour guide went back to the office and retrieved my phone.
No harm, no foul, I guess. I have to say that I was a little freaked out by the experience, though.
So obviously, I’m not going to be able to post any pictures of this part of the tour that were taken by us.
The really odd thing is that I can’t even tell you for sure which tombs we visited other than KV62. The tombs opened for tourists are rotated all of the time (except for KV62, which is almost always open). As I understand it, there are about 10 tombs that have been set up to be visited safely by tourists, and on any given day, 3 of those tombs are open. Unfortunately, I didn’t write down which ones we were going into at the time, so now I’ve completely forgotten.
Looking at the atlas from the Theban Mapping Project, I guess that we went to:
KV6 — Rameses IX. This one seems to be in the right location to be the first one we went into.
KV11 — Rameses III. This one seems likely to be the tomb we visited in this area as it seems to only be partially accessible, and one of the tombs we visited was only partially accessible in this same way.
KV16 — Rameses I. I think this was the last tomb we went into. The pictures of the burial chamber look familiar.
And of course:
KV62 — King Tutankhamen
Part of my confusion is that in some ways, the tombs are hard to tell apart. The burial rituals and the information written on the walls for the king to use when he is resurrected are very similar in style amongst all of the tombs. There really is a sense that once you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. Obviously, that isn’t really true, but as an amateur without any real skills in decoding the contents of the walls, it is very easy for everything you see to blur together.
KV62 was more memorable, though, partly because it was put together in haste when the boy king died at an early age. The tomb is very small but contains a beautiful mural on the back wall of the burial chamber that was unlike anything else we saw in the valley.
Local Tags: carissa, egypt, ken, king tut, luxor, sandi, valley of the kings
Format this post for printing
Wed 9 Jun 2010
Luxor and the Colossi of Memnon
Posted by Ken Atherton under egypt
No Comments
Our next stop on our trip to Egypt was Luxor. Luxor is home to some of the most important archeological sites in all of Egypt and continues to be a hotbed of new discoveries.
Luxor was the home to the capital of the New Kingdom, when it was known as “Waset”. It is home to several famous temples, as well as the Valley of the Kings. As is traditional in ancient Egypt, the monuments are divided between those for the living on the east side of the river and those for the dead on the west. We spent the morning on the west side, then moved to the east side in the afternoon.
It’s impossible in such a short time to get anything but a brief survey of Luxor. One could easily spend weeks there without seeing everything.
One of the interesting things we noticed during our brief time is the huge differences in the state of preservation of various monuments. Some things we saw were virtually destroyed, some had undergone extensive reconstruction efforts, and some had survived thousands of years without tremendous damage.
The Colossi of Memnon are a good example of the nearly destroyed state. The Colossi are two tall statues of Pharaoh Amenhotep III, and were originally set beside the entrance of his memorial temple on the west bank. Today, there is hardly any part of the temple left beyond the statues and the statues themselves have suffer extensive damage. In fact, it seems that the temple may have been gone for a long time because the Greeks are the ones who rechristened the statues with the name “Memnon”, meaning “Ruler of the Dawn” and the statues seem to have been mostly freestanding even at that time. The name choice may be related to the alleged “voice” of one of the the statues which was reported in antiquity after the statues sustained damage in an earthquake in 27 BCE. The voice was believed to have oracular powers, and always occurred near dawn when the wind was blowing in just the right way. For the record, the voice has long been silenced, possibly due to a reconstruction attempt by the Romans.
The Colossi of Memnon. The statue on the right is the one the used to “sing”. The layers of rock you can see on the top half of that statue are parts of the Roman reconstruction. The statue is currently under going some additional repair work.
Tue 8 Jun 2010
Greetings from the American Museum of Natural History
Posted by Ken Atherton under vacation
No Comments
On our recent trip to New York City, Carissa and I visited the American Museum of Natural History, which like any decent child-friendly museum these days has various kiosks located throughout where you can make e-postcards or short videos and send them to your friends by email.
Here is one of the videos Carissa made:
I’ve always appreciated these little kiosks as fun little souvenirs you can send to yourself of your adventures. I imagine we will one day look back at these as the really bad postcards of the early 21st century.
